Our wedding is suppose to be a budget wedding. Now that budget wedding got a little over budget, but it was still the most cost effective wedding out of all of my friends. How was this done? Well it was done by trying to use services from people who were just starting their service business. Well how did that turn out? Not so good to OK.
I was browsing the Wedding Bee classified boards to find some free stuff. One of the posts that I stumbled upon was a thread started by Amy Carter or AmyM83 entitled "Southern California DOC & Planner, FREE services!" so I said what da heck, I like free, my favorite F word. I contacted her and exchanged a few emails and we worked out a trade: services for pictures. I agreed and we were on our merry way.
Now I will admit that we could have finished our timeline a little earlier and given it to Amy to mentally prepare for the wedding day, but honestly, I think that if you are a professional and want to be part of this space, then you go to be able to jump into any situation. We ended up handing off the timeline to her the day of when she showed up to the venue. Our whole purpose of having her there was to take care of the vendors and to keep us on track. If our helpers were pressed for time, then they could ask her for help.
What was the outcome? Let's say that our DJ asked it if was her first time. We fell behind our timeline. She asked us vendor questions during the day. She ended up asking one of the MOH's what to do. She was not authoritative. She didn't say goodbye to my wife, but she did leave some business cards. When there was chaos, she checked out. Now, I won't say it was all bad. She was there and she did handle some stuff. But if you are going into this biz, you go to take charge. The coordinator is suppose to be in charge. She was not.
One thing that was kind of jacked up is that she didn't know people you would think she would know. Example: My sister and mother wanted to use the bathroom in the wedding party changing rooms (immediate family and wedding party were allowed to) and she denied them. Why? Because she didn't know who they were. She thought they were just regular guests. Our venue coordinator knew who they were and let them through. And when they came back from the bathroom, they felt that Amy glared at them. How's that for professionalism.
Now we told her that she could use our pictures from our event. I am down with her using pictures of things that she did, but there is a little problem: She didn't setup anything. Yup. I had people do it. So she will probably end up using the pictures, but if she takes any credit for it, I am going to have to call her out on that.
I take some blame for finding her, but I needed to save some cash money. The fact that my wedding was 2.5 months ago tells you how vivid her services were to us. So would I recommend her? No. Would I pay for her services? Hell no. If people are shooting off glowing reviews, then I guess someone has got to put a lightbulb in my ass and then my review will go also.
Not that I want to promote her or anything, but this is so people can find this review:
Amy Carter amy@rubyslippersevents.com
